Remember that time when that killer went around killing 20 schoolchildren with his bare hands before the police turned up? No? Me neither. Other crimes will happen. Other crimes will require other responses. But constantly saying 'Don't think about this, think about that other stuff' strikes me as lunacy, and all because people want to be able to keep their guns.

Remember that time when that killer went around killing 20 schoolchildren with his bare hands before the police turned up? No? Me neither. Other crimes will happen. Other crimes will require other responses. But constantly saying 'Don't think about this, think about that other stuff' strikes me as lunacy, and all because people want to be able to keep their guns.

How am I deflecting? I'm saying that some of the proposed laws will be ineffectual and relate to a tiny number of crimes. If we're gunning for marginal effects, thats a pretty tiny margin.

Remember that time when that killer went around killing 20 schoolchildren with his bare hands before the police turned up? No? Me neither. Other crimes will happen. Other crimes will require other responses. But constantly saying 'Don't think about this, think about that other stuff' strikes me as lunacy, and all because people want to be able to keep their guns.

I HESITATE to offer thoughts about the school shooting in Connecticut that has seen 20 children and seven adults murdered and the gunman also dead. Your correspondent has been in the rural Midwest researching a column and heard the news on the car radio. Along with a sense of gloom, I found I mostly wanted to see my own, elementary-school-age children back home in Washington, DC, and had little desire to listen to pundits of any stripe: hence my reluctance to weigh in now.

To be fair, on NPR, the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne had sensible things to say about President Barack Obama’s statement on the killings, and how it was probably significant when the president seemed to suggest that he was minded to take action on gun control, and never mind the politics. On the same show the moderate conservative columnist, David Brooks, expressed sensible caution about assuming that stricter gun controls could have stopped this particular shooting.

Switching to red-blooded conservative talk radio, I found two hosts offering a “move along, nothing to see here” defence of the status quo. One suggested that listeners should not torment themselves trying to understand “craziness”, though it would, the pair agreed, be understandable if some parents were tempted to remove their children from public education and homeschool them.

To that debate, all I can offer is the perspective of someone who has lived and worked in different corners of the world, with different gun laws.

Here is my small thought. It is quite possible, perhaps probable, that stricter gun laws of the sort that Mr Obama may or may not be planning, would not have stopped the horrible killings of this morning. But that is a separate question from whether it is a good idea to allow private individuals to own guns. And that, really, is what I think I understand by gun control. Once you have guns in circulation, in significant numbers, I suspect that specific controls on things like automatic weapons or large magazines can have only marginal effects. Once lots of other people have guns, it becomes rational for you to want your own too.

The first time that I was posted to Washington, DC some years ago, the capital and suburbs endured a frightening few days at the hands of a pair of snipers, who took to killing people at random from a shooting position they had established in the boot of a car. I remember meeting a couple of White House correspondents from American papers, and hearing one say: but the strange thing is that Maryland (where most of the killings were taking place) has really strict gun laws. And I remember thinking: from the British perspective, those aren’t strict gun laws. Strict laws involve having no guns.

After a couple of horrible mass shootings in Britain, handguns and automatic weapons have been effectively banned. It is possible to own shotguns, and rifles if you can demonstrate to the police that you have a good reason to own one, such as target shooting at a gun club, or deer stalking, say. The firearms-ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant's mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal-record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.

Vitally, it is also very hard to get hold of ammunition. Just before leaving Britain in the summer, I had lunch with a member of parliament whose constituency is plagued with gang violence and drug gangs. She told me of a shooting, and how it had not led to a death, because the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well, and how this was very common, according to her local police commander. Even hardened criminals willing to pay for a handgun in Britain are often getting only an illegally modified starter’s pistol turned into a single-shot weapon.

And, to be crude, having few guns does mean that few people get shot. In 2008-2009, there were 39 fatal injuries from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one sixth the size of America’s. In America, there were 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.

I would also say, to stick my neck out a bit further, that I find many of the arguments advanced for private gun ownership in America a bit unconvincing, and tinged with a blend of excessive self-confidence and faulty risk perception.

I am willing to believe that some householders, in some cases, have defended their families from attack because they have been armed. But I also imagine that lots of ordinary adults, if woken in the night by an armed intruder, lack the skill to wake, find their weapon, keep hold of their weapon, use it correctly and avoid shooting the wrong person. And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer.

As for the National Rifle Association bumper stickers arguing that only an armed citizenry can prevent tyranny, I wonder if that isn’t a form of narcissism, involving the belief that lone, heroic individuals will have the ability to identify tyranny as it descends, recognise it for what it is, and fight back. There is also the small matter that I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule.

Nor is it the case that the British are relaxed about being subjects of a monarch, or are less fussed about freedoms. A conservative law professor was recently quoted in the papers saying he did not want to live in a country where the police were armed and the citizens not. I fear in Britain, at least, native gun-distrust goes even deeper than that: the British don’t even like their police to be armed (though more of them are than in the past).

But here is the thing. The American gun debate takes place in America, not Britain or Japan. And banning all guns is not about to happen (and good luck collecting all 300m guns currently in circulation, should such a law be passed). It would also not be democratic. I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.

So in short I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like today’s. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen. So I have a feeling that even a more courageous debate than has been heard for some time, with Mr Obama proposing gun-control laws that would have been unthinkable in his first term, will not change very much at all. Hence the gloom.

A gunman ambushed four volunteer firefighters responding to an intense pre-dawn house fire Monday morning outside Rochester, N.Y., killing two before ending up dead himself, authorities said. Police used an armored vehicle to evacuate more than 30 nearby residents.

The gunman fired at the firefighters when they arrived shortly after 5:30 a.m. at the blaze near the Lake Ontario shore in Webster, town Police Chief Gerald Pickering said. The first Webster police officer who arrived chased the suspect and exchanged gunfire with him, authorities said.

"It does appear it was a trap" for the first responders to the fire, Pickering said at a news conference.

Authorities didn't say how the gunman died or whether anyone might have died in the fire itself.

One of the dead firefighters was also a town police lieutenant; it wasn't clear whether he returned fire. An off-duty police officer who was driving by was injured by shrapnel, Pickering said.

The fire started in one home and spread to two others and a car, officials said. The gunfire initially kept firefighters from battling the blazes. Police say four homes were destroyed and four damaged.

I had read somewhere that the die-hard gun rights folks weren't too pleased with the NRA because they tried to prevent Heller from making it to SCOTUS. Presumably they were afraid of a precedent not in their favor, but regardless those further to the right were displeased. When I saw that they filed an amicus brief I presumed that I was mistaken, but it seems that it was either submitted later on in the process or they were trying to wrap Heller up into one of their cases that was banking on less substantial reasonings for striking down DC's law.

All this leads to the question: why is the NRA the great satan when Alan Gura is a more appropriate claimaint to the title?

A lawyer who's asking to sue Connecticut for $100 million on behalf of a 6-year-old Newtown school shooting survivor who heard violence over the school's intercom system says the potential claim is about improving school security, not money.

"It's about living in a world that's safe," New Haven attorney Irving Pinsky told The Associated Press on Saturday. "The answer is about protecting the kids."

Pinsky asked this week to sue the state, which has immunity against most lawsuits unless it gives a party permission to go forward with a claim. Connecticut's claims commissioner couldn't be reached for comment Saturday.

Pinksy's client, whom he calls "Jill Doe" in the claim, sustained "emotional and psychological trauma and injury" on Dec. 14 after gunman Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and gunned down 20 children and six adults inside in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

The child heard "conversations, gunfire and screaming" over Sandy Hook's intercom after someone in the office apparently switched on the system, according to the claim. Pinsky said Saturday he didn't know whether his client saw anyone die.

The state Board of Education, Department of Education and state education commissioner failed to protect the child "from foreseeable harm," including by failing to provide a safe school setting, the filing said.

It also said the parties failed to review and carefully scrutinize annual strategic school profile reports from the local school district and Sandy Hook Elementary as well as "other submissions with respect to student safety and emergency response planning and protocol."

It says the parties also failed to require the school and local Board of Education to formulate and implement an effective student safety emergency response plan.

Pinsky said Saturday he didn't want to reveal more about the 6-year-old or details about her experience during the shooting because of privacy concerns.

The attorney said he hasn't gotten a reply from the state yet. The Hartford Courant first reported the filing.

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